The Shut-Your-Mouth Machine is a device inspired by the arcade game Whac-A-Mole, and its particular way of negative interaction. The game typically consists in smashing moles when they pop up from holes distributed on a plane. Constructing the meaning of the piece through its negation is one of my personal interests, and I have been working on it in recent years, unfolding a critical approach to such interactive works where the user has a total degree of control over the mechanism. In this case the negation is metaphorical and physical, because the game consists/lies in pushing a big red button to silence the voice projected by the device. What you hear is my personal recorded voice talking about the work. So, when you push the button you are silencing my own speech. I am interested in proposing a work that constrains the user to deny it, a work where there is a circular contradiction between listening and silencing: maybe I would want to listen to the voice, but if I want to complete the game I have to stop the meaning contained in the voice. So the meaning doesn’t simply come from my voice, but from the collaboration between my speech and those who restrain it. In this sense, the work includes a critical to traditional relationship between a work of art and its receiver.